Göndul laughed. “So, she opened a hole and buried him twenty feet deep. If we’re lucky, he’ll suffocate before he wakes up.”
Chapter 21
“Tell me about this Vasyli Verichenko,” I said to Antonio. “As I remember, you said he wouldn’t be a problem.”
Antonio refilled my wineglass and sighed. “As far as his magic, I didn’t consider him a threat, especially compared to Gonçalves or Conkling. And this Dark Elf you speak of would swat him like a fly. But he is clever.”
The old man sat back in his chair and took a sip from his glass. “I first met Vasyli in Vienna before the last war. He’s Ukrainian, and at that time he was working for the Soviet NKVD—the secret police. During the war, I heard he was a double agent, selling information to both the Communists and the Nazis. That’s when he started dabbling in blood magic.” Antonio snorted. “Plenty of blood available then.”
“Why would he want a Dragon’s egg?” Dorina asked. “What are his talents?”
“He’s a summoner and diviner,” Antonio said. “That’s why he went for blood. Much easier to summon a demon using blood.”
“You don’t suppose he’s stupid enough to try to bind a Dragon, do you?” Göndul asked.
Roger, who was the oldest of us, shook his head. “I’ve never heard of a mage who summoned a Dragon and lived.”
“He doesn’t have to summon this one,” I said. “He just needs to bind it when it hatches.”
My statement was met with silence, but everyone stared at me as they processed the implications.
The first to speak was Antonio. “Yes, he is crazy enough to try that.”
“It’s alive,” I said, “and it’s close to hatching. I could feel it.”
“Anyone have any idea what we should do next?” Roger asked.
“First, we cast a truth spell on Dumitrescu to see what he knows. Then, we pay him from Gonçalves’s money, slap a tracking spell on him, and hope he leads us to Verichenko or someone else who knows where the egg is,” I said.
“Sounds good to me,” Cassiel said.
Antonio let me use his lab to brew a truth potion. I normally tried to stay away from coercive magic, but sometimes the ends justify the means. The ingredients themselves were very common, but the rune magic that triggered the final reaction was key. Two drops in Dumitrescu’s coffee the following morning was all it took to learn everything he knew about Verichenko. I paid him ten thousand euros, Antonio cast a tracking spell on him, and we turned him loose. Two of the Paladins followed him as he left.
I didn’t expect Dumitrescu to lead us anywhere useful. Among the information he dropped was that Conkling hadn’t paid him yet, and Gonçalves had only paid him two thousand euros out of the promised ten thousand. I doubted that Dumitrescu would be seeking either of them out, however. Verichenko had paid him ten thousand, so with twenty-two thousand euros in hand, I expected the little fixer to drop out of sight.
In the end, Dumitrescu surprised me. He went home. I could have told him that was a bad idea. The people waiting for him weren’t kind.
I was in the process of going out to find the address Dumitrescu had given us for Verichenko when one of the Paladins called Roger.
“They followed him to an old Soviet apartment block in the northern part of the city. Evidently, someone was waiting for him. They want to know what to do,” Roger said.
“What are the people waiting for him doing?” I asked. I knew it would take at least half an hour to get there. “I mean, are they killing him?”
“He says there’s a lot of yelling and bumping around going on.”
“Tell them to interrupt things. Chase them off, then follow them.”
Roger spoke into the phone, then hung up. I headed for the door, but Cassiel stepped in front of me, holding a leather harness.
“I can get there faster than a car or the bus,” he said.
I nodded as I took the harness and slipped my arms and legs through it. “Let’s go up to the roof,” I said, turning toward the stairs.
Flying over the city was as thrilling as when we had flown in Transvyl and in the mountains. I tried not to feel jealous of Göndul, who got to do it all the time.
The ugly apartment blocks were separated by trees, so we landed in the green area next to where Dumitrescu lived. I pounded up the stairs, trying to ignore the smell to his third-floor flat. The door stood open, and one of the Paladins met me in the foyer.
“They took off when we barged in,” he said. “Pavel took our car and followed them.”
He led me inside a small apartment—three rooms, a tiny kitchen, and a bathroom. The place had been ransacked, and Dumitrescu’s body lay in one of the bedrooms. He’d been beaten, but that wasn’t what killed him.
“They shot him when we came in,” the Paladin said. “Took a shot at us, and then ran.”
“Did they carry anything out of here?” I asked.
“Maybe. I’ve checked, and I can’t find the money we paid him.”
“Police are here,” Cassiel said from the front room. We went out and saw him standing by the window.
“Let’s head up to the roof,” I said.
We could hear the police on the stairs below us as we climbed to the top floor. The door leading to the roof was locked, but I broke it easily. Cassiel ferried the Paladin to the ground and then came back for me. After getting Pavel’s mobile number, Cassiel and I flew off to follow Dumitrescu’s killers.
I wasn’t surprised that they were headed toward the Primaverii district, which contained the address we had for Verichenko. The building turned out to be a luxury high-rise. Dumitrescu had told us he met Verichenko in a penthouse apartment, so I assumed we would be able to drop in from above.
Cassiel landed on the roof, but we immediately encountered a set of wards, which gave us no way to access the apartment. I determined they were anchored by the walls and the roof. We retreated to the street, met up with Pavel, and called Roger.
The Paladins put a twenty-four-hour watch on Verichenko’s building, photographing everyone who went in or out. By the second day, we had a picture that Antonio verified as Verichenko.
As I told Antonio and the Paladins, if Verichenko wanted the Dragon that was inside the egg, he would have to hatch it. The method for doing so wasn’t available on Google, but plenty of arcane knowledge about other realms was floating about. The Paladins’ information on the subject agreed with the sketchy paragraph in my grimoire.
Evidently, hatching a Dragon required a lot more heat than a sunny beach.
“Are there a lot of volcanoes on Draegar?” I asked Cassiel.
“All over the place. It’s even more volcanically active than Hel,” he replied. “Makes Transvyl look sunny.”
At least the air in Transvyl was breathable. The sulfur dioxide in Hel’s atmosphere didn’t encourage a lot of tourism. The natives’ carnivorous habits weren’t very welcoming, either.
I figured Verichenko’s closest incubators were Mount Etna, in Sicily, or the steel mill in Galati, Romania, northeast of Bucharest on the Danube River. After the egg hatched, he would have to contrive some way to confine it until he could bind it.
Having once had the misfortune of witnessing a demon summoning, I couldn’t imagine that Verichenko would want to try binding a newly-hatched Dragon in his fancy penthouse. Personally, I would want to confine the hatchling to a blast-proof concrete bunker, but a deep basement or someplace far away from civilization would be a second choice. I wondered what facilities a mage might be able to rent or commandeer at the steel mill.
I checked with Antonio, and he put out some feelers. The man always amazed me. In some things, he’d never left the nineteenth century. Instead of using a telephone, he wrote on little calling cards that his chauffeur delivered. People always responded, if not immediately, then within twenty-four hours.
The following morning, Göndul and I called on the offices of an industrial real estate company under the pretext of wanting to lease a ware
house in Galati. I donned a glamour that made me look like her little sister, and we both dressed to distract.
The company’s managing director offered us coffee, and a drop of a potion in his cup put him to sleep for the majority of our visit. That allowed Göndul to plunder his computer files. She downloaded everything that looked interesting onto a portable hard drive, and we took it over to Roger’s nightclub.
One of the Paladins sorted through all the data while we sat back and drank hot coffee spiked with whiskey. The weather had taken a wintery turn, and I wasn’t dressed for it.
“You don’t use computers?” Göndul asked me as I paged through the email on my phone.
“They don’t like me. I bought one once. When it burned out, the company gave me a new one under warranty. After the third one, they gave me my money back. I hire people to do computer stuff.”
“But you use a smart phone.”
“Yes, and I don’t know why it works for me.” I grinned. “It gives me a good excuse to let other people do all the computer things, though.”
Roger came by after a while with more drinks and a few pages of paper.
“That was a pretty good guess,” he said. “A shell company owned by one of Vasyli’s buddies just signed a lease on a small warehouse next to the steel mill.”
“Now all we have to do is wait for him to move the egg,” I said.
“And hope that all the other people looking for it aren’t waiting for that as well,” Cassiel said.
We waited for five days. During that time, our watcher in Galati told us there was a lot of activity at the warehouse with materials being delivered and workmen going in and out.
On Friday afternoon, a white service van pulled into the garage under Verichenko’s building in Bucharest. About the same time, a young blonde woman in a skimpy red dress arrived in a taxi and went inside. An hour later, the van pulled back out again and headed toward the main road out of town, followed by a fancy SUV carrying Verichenko and the blonde in the back seat.
“I wonder if blondes work better,” I mused out loud. “I wouldn’t think that a demon would care.”
“What?” Göndul asked, giving me a weird look.
“Oh, the last blood mage I dealt with kept sacrificing blonde women,” I said. “I just wonder why they don’t choose redheads or brunettes.”
“You think that’s what he intends to do?” Cassiel asked. “Sacrifice her?”
“I’d bet money on it.”
Since I had far better night vision than Göndul, Cassiel strapped me to his chest and we took off to try to follow Verichenko and the van. Even though we flew east, the sunset reflected on the clouds over the Black Sea in the distance provided a breathtaking panorama.
We had cars following Verichenko, so Cassiel took a shortcut, flying directly to Galati. That cut at least a third of the distance, and we arrived at the steel mill a few minutes before those on the ground. As we soared over the area, I saw that the facility was huge, and easily one of the uglier places I had seen in Earth’s realm. It always amazed me how Humans didn’t mind tearing up the earth and polluting the world they lived in.
Verichenko’s little convoy stopped at a gate into the facility, showed some kind of papers or identification, and drove through. Cassiel followed above them. They wound their way through the vast facility, between all the buildings, piles of slag, tailings, and coal, rusted scrap, and things I didn’t even know how to describe. All the while, a couple of tall smokestacks belching smoke drew closer. The air stank and burned my nose and throat.
Our quarry stopped in front of a building—two stories tall, twenty-five yards wide and fifty yards long, with a broad garage-style door at one end. According to the maps and schematics I had studied, it was about three hundred yards from the closest blast furnace. We circled above Verichenko’s cars as they drove into the building and closed the doors.
We flew back past all the fences and checkpoints and located the Paladins a mile or so from the mill.
“What do we do now?” Cassiel asked.
“I assume he wants to get the egg into that blast furnace,” I said, “but unless he knows more than we do, he can’t know how long it will take before it hatches. It could be hours, days, or months.”
“We probably just have to wait,” Roger said. “Knowing how poorly the workers are paid, I am assuming he plans to bribe the people in charge, and he probably has a lot of leeway as to how long they’ll accommodate him.”
“I think we’ll see him move the egg to the furnace building tonight,” I said. “I think he arrived after dark on purpose, and from his perspective, there’s no benefit in waiting. We need to hijack it before he finishes his plan.”
“And if we can’t?” Cassiel asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t think we have the skills to retrieve it once he drops it into a crucible of molten metal. Do you? I think the only option then would be to call in the battle mages.”
Everyone thought about that, and I saw a number of reluctant nods.
Roger said, “Agreed. Let’s get to it.”
Chapter 22
Göndul cast an illusion over the Paladins’ vehicles, making them appear to be trucks with the steel company’s logo hauling supplies. The guards at the gate simply waved them through, and we drove to near Verichenko’s warehouse. We had a dozen people, all mages, except for me. In addition to Göndul and me, three were trained warriors who could deal with threats without resorting to magic.
We didn’t know how many men Verichenko had. Cassiel and I had counted six in Verichenko’s party, including him, but not including the blonde. But there had been men at the warehouse already, and we didn’t know how many. My guess—and those of Roger and Cassiel—was that our opponents were mainly Human non-magic users.
An hour after Verichenko arrived, two men in hardhats and overalls with the steel company logo showed up in a small truck and went inside the warehouse. A little later, the garage door opened, and the white van drove out. It followed the small truck in the direction of the blast furnace building.
About halfway to the furnace, and out of sight of both the warehouse and the blast furnace, they turned a corner and found a metal pole lying across the road. The truck and the van came to a stop, and a couple of cursing men got out of the truck to examine the pole. Two Paladins put knives to their throats and took them captive.
I walked up to the open window on the van’s driver’s side, shot the driver in the face, and fired three more sleepy-gas balls inside.
“How long do we have to wait?” Göndul asked.
“We can open the doors and let it air out in a couple of minutes,” I said. “Then as soon as all the gas dissipates, we can get in and drive it out of here.”
The men from the plant were pushed against a wall, and I shot a sleepy-gas ball between them. In a few seconds, both slumped to the ground.
It seemed too easy, and I was nervous. A couple of minutes later, my concern was validated.
“Kill them!” a voice shouted.
I whirled to see Verichenko and a demon. A very large demon—at least a major demon, maybe even a greater demon—nude, male, red-skinned, broad as a truck, and about ten feet tall. And he looked like he planned to do what Verichenko told him to. Damn.
“What the hell?” I heard Göndul’s long sword rasp from its sheath.
I drew my own sword and drifted to my left. I had demonbane paintballs in a jar in my bag, but both paintball guns were loaded with sleepy gas. Too late to change that.
Göndul jumped at the demon and swung her sword. There was a sound like an ax hitting a tree, and then Göndul was flying backward and hitting the wall of a building. I circled, trying to get around the beast. A fireball flew past me and hit the demon. The demon laughed, a sound that sent chills down my spine.
“No, you idiot! That’s a fire demon,” I shouted as the demon opened his mouth and sent a sheet of flame toward the mage who had thrown the fireball. I dove and rolled under him, feel
ing the searing heat on my back.
Coming to my feet, I pivoted past the demon and sliced at his ankle on my way by, cutting through his Achilles tendon. His scream of pain and anger sounded a lot better than his laughter.
A bolt of lightning struck the demon, halting him in his tracks. He shook it off and sprayed the area with more flame. Then he started toward where Göndul was struggling to stand, but he stopped when he tried to put weight on his injured leg. I took the opportunity to slice through the back of his knee of his good leg. The leg buckled, and he fell to his knees.
The only problem was that his arms were a lot longer than mine. As he fell, he backhanded me, and I flew about thirty feet down the street.
Another lightning bolt hit the demon, and then a ball of energy. He responded with another blast of flame.
“Kill them! Kill them!” Verichenko chanted.
I snatched a paintball gun from my bag and fired in his direction, but he ducked around the corner of a building. Fighting my way to my feet, I snuck up behind the demon and brought my sword down on his head with both hands. The blade sank deep, cleaving his skull in two all the way to his neck.
The demon reacted by twisting around and trying to grab me, spouting flame around the street from his split mouth. His eyes, filled with hate, fixed on me, and I backed away as fast as I could. Flame erupted from the wound in his head like a fountain, and he lunged at me. Another energy ball flew toward him, hitting him in the back of the head and driving his face into the pavement.
Movement to my left caught my attention. The blue-skinned demon wasn’t as large as his fire-spouting buddy, but he seemed quicker as he ran toward me. My options were limited, with a building behind me, a fire demon in front of me, and another demon reaching for me.
The blue demon sprouted an Elven arrow from his eye as I dived forward between his legs. A wave of cold washed over me as I passed under him, a cold so deep as to set my teeth chattering.
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